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Science, Reason, Knowledge, and Wisdom: A Critique of Specialism Nicholas Maxwell University College, London Published in Inquiry, vol. 23, 1980, pp. 19-81. In this paper I argue for a kind of intellectual inquiry which has, as its basic aim, to help all of us to resolve rationally the most important problems that we encounter in our lives, problems that arise as we seek to discover and achieve that which is of value in life. Rational problem-solving involves articulating our problems, proposing and criticizing possible solutions. It also involves breaking problems up into subordinate problems, creating a tradition of specialized problem-solving - specialized scientific, academic inquiry, in other words. It is vital, however, that specialized academic problem-solving be subordinated to discussion of our more fundamental problems of living. At present specialized academic inquiry is dissociated from problems of living - the sin of specialism, which I criticize. I In this paper I discuss two rival views about the nature of intellectual inquiry. I call these two views fundamentalism and specialism. I shall argue that at present the whole institutional structure of scientific, academic inquiry, by and large, presupposes specialism. Of the two views under consideration it is, however, fundamentalism, and not specialism, which provides us with a rational conception of intellectual inquiry. Failure to put fundamentalism into practice has profoundly damaging con-sequences for science and scholarship, and indeed for life, for our whole modern world. Ideally intellectual inquiry ought to help us to tackle rationally those problems of living which we encounter in seeking to discover and achieve that which is of value in life. Intellectual inquiry ought, in other words, to devote reason to the enhancement of wisdom (wisdom being defined here as the capacity to discover and achieve that which is of value in life, for oneself and others - wisdom thus including knowledge and understanding). In fact, at present, scientific, academic inquiry gives priority to the achievement of knowledge only, rather than to the achievement of wisdom. It is essentially the general adoption of specialism which is responsible for the persistence of this highly undesirable state of affairs. II According to fundamentalism, in the end the whole point of intellectual inquiry is to help us to improve our answers to four fundamental questions, namely: 1. What kind of world is this? 2. How do we fit into the world and how did we come to be? 3. What is of most value in life and how is it to be achieved? 4. How can we help develop a better human world?1 In particular, according to fundamentalism, it is a basic task of intellectual inquiry to help us to tackle these four fundamental problems in a rational fashion. Rational problem-solving is understood here to involve, at the very least, putting into practice the two heuristic rules: a. Articulate, and seek to improve the articulation of, the problem to be solved; b. Propose and critically assess possible solutions.2 There is of course more to rational problem-solving than this.3 But these two rules are understood by fundamentalism to constitute the nub of rationality. Thus, according to fundamentalism, the central and fundamental task of intellectual inquiry is to improve the articulation of the above four problems, and to propose and critically assess possible solutions to them. All other intellectual activity is subservient to this. A basic idea of fundamentalism is that ideally it is we ourselves who answer the above four questions, as we live. The proper task of reason, thought, intellectual inquiry is to help us to arrive at answers that we really do wish to give to these questions, rather than to determine the answers for us. Intellectual inquiry is our servant, not our master. It is not in itself any kind of authority or oracle. Two further extremely important, elementary heuristic rules of rational problem-solving are: c. Break up the basic problem to be solved into subordinate, specialized, easier-to-solve problems. d. Interconnect attempts to solve basic and specialized problems, so that the one may influence and be influenced by the other. According to fundamentalism, an immense amount of intellectual activity arises, quite properly, as a result of putting these two heuristic rules into practice. That is, in order to improve our answers to our four basic problems we create a vast network of sub-problems and preliminary problems-the specialized, technical problems of science and scholarship. A great deal of intellectual activity consists in seeking to solve these limited, technical problems of specialized scientific, academic disciplines. It is however of supreme importance - according to fundamentalism - that we do not lose our way within this network, this maze, of sub-problems. If intellectual inquiry is to be rational, it is essential that intellectual priority be given to the four fundamental problems, and to the tasks of proposing and critically assessing possible solutions to them. In order to tackle specialized problems in a rational fashion, in short, it is essential to tackle such problems as sub-problems of the four fundamental problems. Specialized scientists and scholars, in other words, in order to be rational, must also be philosophers or generalists, concerned in their specialized work to help us solve our fundamental problems. Figure 1 gives an indication of the way in which some current specialized academic disciplines may be conceived, in fundamentalist terms, as being designed to help us solve the above four basic problems. As the diagram indicates, it is essential for the intellectual integrity and rationality of intellectual inquiry as a whole that there be a constant two-way flow of information between specialized problem-solving and fundamental problem-solving. Two minor adjustments may be made to the doctrine of fundamentalism as just outlined. In the first place it may be argued that philosophy ought not to be conceived as yet another specialized discipline concerned to solve its own special problems. Rather, philosophy needs to be conceived as that part of the whole intellectual enterprise which seeks to articulate fundamental problems, propose and criticize possible solutions to these problems. Philosophy, according to this conception, constantly gives rise to new specialized problems, and is itself profoundly influenced by our success and failure in seeking to solve specialized problems. It is in just this sense that almost all the great philosophers of the past have contributed to 'philosophy': Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant. Mill, Comte, Marx, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Mach, Russell - to name a few. It is vital, however, according to this viewpoint, that philosophy is not treated as a specialized, professional discipline, the exclusive preserve of the expert. The whole rationale of intellectual inquiry is to promote fundamental rational problem-solving as widely as possible, as an integral part of life. Rendering this the exclusive task of professional philosophers sabotages utterly the whole raison d'etre of intellectual inquiry. This non- specialized, fundamentalist conception of philosophy is perhaps above all to be found upheld by the thinkers of the Enlightenment - for whom critical philosophy was the basic instrument of human enlightenment.4 Strictly, of course, formulating fundamentalism in terms of this Enlightenment conception of philosophy requires us to modify Figure 1, in that 'philosophy' ceases altogether to be any kind of specialized academic discipline existing alongside other disciplines, and becomes instead identical to all thought about fundamental problems, ideally pursued rationally as an integral part of life. Formulating fundamentalism in this way, however, is unfortunately liable to lead to misunderstandings. Academic philosophers will object to the disappearance of specialized philosophy, not realizing that there must always be an important place in academic inquiry for those concerned with fundamental problems and concerned to promote open, critical discussion of fundamental problems. Everyone else will object to the idea that philosophy should monopolize concern with fundamental problems, 'philosophy' being misunderstood here to mean 'academic philosophy' rather than being understood to be simply all our personal and public thinking about our fundamental problems. The essential tenet of fundamentalism after all is that all inquiry, personal, social, and academic, ought to be organized along fundamentalist lines. Whether or not thought about fundamental problems is called 'philosophy', and whether or not academic philosophy continues to exist as a specialized discipline, are matters of minor importance. In order to avoid misunderstandings concerning these minor matters, I leave Figure 1 unmodified. (The diagram is, in fact, a modified version of the original diagram, one that appears in my Cutting God in Half – And Putting the Pieces Together Again.) The second qualification that may be made to the above viewpoint amounts to this. It is quite wrong - it may be argued - to suggest that the enterprise of seeking to improve our answers to the above four fundamental questions is somehow exclusively the concern of intellectual inquiry. Literature, theatre, music, art, religion can all be interpreted as being concerned to illuminate our responses to these basic questions - especially the last two questions. Our whole culture can, in other words, be conceived of in fundamentalist terms as being designed, ideally, to help us to discover and create that which is of most value in life. In engaging in our work, in social and political activity, we should, ideally - it may be argued - be seeking to develop improved answers in practice to the last two questions, in one way or another. Indeed, in our whole way of life -our way of being on this earth - we give implicitly our actual answers to such questions, whether we are aware of this or not. And in so far as we seek to improve our lives, we seek to improve the actual answers that we give to these questions, in the fabric of our actions.

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